Hemingway: A style characteristic of economy and understatement

American writer and journalist, Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was a novelist and a short story writer. His father was Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a country doctor, and mother Grace Hall Hemingway. He was named after his grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and a Civil War veteran who lived with the family.

While in his 20s he became a member of the expatriate community in Paris, known as the 'Lost Generation'. His married life was never happy. He was married four times and was presumed to have had several extra marital affairs over the years.

He is well known for his distinctive writing style characteristic of economy and understatement. He has made a huge contribution to shaping the twentieth century fiction. He has influenced great writers like Charles Bukowski, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Richard Ford, Jack Kerouac, Elmore Leonard, J. D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Colm T›ib­n, Norman Mailer and Mohsin Hamid.

His protagonists are generally considered to be stoic males. In many of his stories he paints a picture of destructive interactions between male and female sexual partners, within marital unions and among most other combinations of men and women.

For example Hills Like White Elephants, Now I Lay Me, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and The Sun Also Rises. This may be due to his domineering mother, although this has not been proven.

Although his mother was hoping that he would develop a liking to music, she being a musician, he took after his father spending summer vacations in a house called 'Windemere' on Michigan's Walloon Lake, which they owned, which probably instilled in him a passion for outdoor activities and living in remote and isolated areas.

One section of the famous sea trilogy was published as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. And the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. These awards helped to restore his international reputation.

He's also reputed for having a bad luck streak. While on a safari he was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes. He was so badly injured that some American news papers carried his obituary. He was then again injured in a bushfire accident only one month afterwards. He was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize. He drank heavily and his depression worsened with it.

Throughout his life he suffered from physical and mental problems. Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, after which he received treatment. But In July 1961 after a premature release from a mental institution, where he was being treated for severe depression, he committed suicide. He was 61 when he died.